Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Pasqueflowers (Studies in Light)

Most living things come
softly to hard sunlight. Pasqueflowers
are no different. They are soft on the
eye and soft to the touch. Pasqueflowers,
sometimes referred to as prairie crocus, are some of your more quiet neighbors. They are not particularly loud in color and
do not aspire to overtake the landscape with explosive clusters of
blossoms. Instead, they hold aloft a
single dim lantern on each stem. The fifty-cent
piece sized blossoms may reach heights of a foot or more, but are just as likely
to remain close to the ground. The color
of the flower may range from bluish to purple.

The other day, while on a
drive to the top of Hogback Mountain, a dozen or so miles as the crow flies
from my house, that girl, my sister, my brother-in-law, and I came upon a patch
of pasueflowers. We were at an elevation
near 8,000 feet. The flowers were
growing amid checkerboards of light and shadow at the feet of some weather-twisted
whitebark pine. The colors were muted
enough we might have easily missed them if focusing on nearby stands
of red paintbrush. I stopped the truck
so all of us could pile out and take a closer look.

Posted today are some
studies I made of these pasqueflowers emerging from the shadows.

A word of caution: the
fuzzy leaves and stems of pasqueflowers may irritate your skin and all parts of
this wildflower are poisonous if ingested.
One of the books I often refer to when identifying flowers noted that some
Native American tribes crushed the leaves of this plant and applied them to rheumatic
joints as a counter-irritant.